All posts tagged social status

Psychologists have long known that people are wildly overconfident in their abilities: Most drivers think they are above average; most academics place themselves in the top echelon of their field. We all live in Lake Wobegon, mentally speaking. But why would this cognitive quirk come to exist? You’d think it would be useful, evolutionarily speaking—and, well, just plain useful—to have an accurate understanding of one’s abilities. For one thing, you’d know what to work on in order to achieve true excellence, rather than ersatz excellence.

A new study suggests an answer: Overconfident people are perceived as having more social status. In one of several related experiments, researchers had people take a geography quiz —first alone, then in pairs. The task involved placing cities on a map of North America unmarked by state or national borders. The participants rated themselves on their own abilities and rated each other, secretly, on a number of qualities.

As expected, most people rated their own geographic knowledge far higher than actual performance would justify. In the interesting new twist, however, the people most prone to overrate themselves got higher marks from their partners on whether they “deserved respect and admiration, had influence over the decisions, led the decision-making process, and contributed to the decisions.”

On strict performance grounds, then, overconfidence can be viewed as a cognitive “error”; but it has advantages in the social world. The authors write:

Why do people order super-size portions of French fries? To move themselves up the societal pecking order, according to a new study, summarized here by Jonah Lehrer.

Shockingly, the strategy backfires. It turns out packing in massive amounts of food, while arguably analogous, psychologically, to buying 70-inch plasma TV’s or multiple SUV’s leads only to “a sad feedback loop of obesity.”

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."